Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Politix Update: Ben Carson Dishes Out The Nutty From Behind His Invisible Shield

The
first question we need to ask about Ben Carson is why an
African-American would want to be a Republican, let alone a Republican
candidate
for president. The second question is why Carson not only is doing
well, attracting substantial numbers of whites from a party unwelcoming
to blacks, but also is gaining in the polls and nearly even with Donald Trump in a big one. The third question
is whether he's nuts.

The
third question is the easiest to answer: Maybe Carson is nuts, maybe he
isn't nuts. The standards constituting what is nuts have become laughably flexible, and the Republican Party, in becoming a safe haven for
extremism of many stripes, has cornered the market on politician nuts, including a number
of presidential wannabe nuts in recent years, among them Michele
Bachmann, Tom Tancredo, David Duke, Sarah Palin and Alan
Keyes. (Whether Rudy Giuliani is a nut or merely a sleazeball is open to question.)

The
first question is tougher to answer since only 5 percent of blacks
identify themselves as Republican, another 5 percent lean Republican,
and 90 percent of blacks voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Which begins
to explain why there are only three black Republicans in Congress and 40
black Democrats and makes Carson such a . . . uh, freak.

What tends to get lost in the puzzlement
over Carson is that he comes from a long
conservative tradition rooted in the black church and consequentially a
belief in religious
morality and
free-market enterprise that makes the Democratic Party anathema to him.
Same for former pizza magnate Herman Cain in the 2012 GOP primary,
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Congresswoman Mia Love, and to
a lesser extent former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who in 2008
seemed to be one more Republican insult away from endorsing Barack Obama.

The
answer to the second question is that many conservative white
Republicans, and there are hardly any other kind, view Carson as being
"safe" despite the GOP reliably being opposed to any kind of federal
program that seeks to level the playing field for minorities and in support of laws that make it tougher for minorities to vote, and his high poll standings have earned him a spot just off center stage to the right (!) of Trump at the second presidential debate tonight. (Jeb Bush will be to the left.) Carson actually is in a statistical tie with Trump in the authoritative New York Times-CBS News Poll, his vertiginous rise largely at the expense of Jeb! and Scott Walker.

Focus groups
say Carson seems like a "nice" guy, which doesn't necessarily translate
into meaning that he knows his place as some conservative whites believe
that blacks should, but his quiet dignity makes him an appealing alternative to Republicans turned off by Trump's braggadocio, and what is conservatism if not the last bastion of self-restraint in a world that sometimes seems about to spin off its axis? (Carson likes to relate how he prayed to God to give him the right woman and how
he has been married to his wife, Candy, for 40 years, while Trump brags about
all the beautiful women he has bedded.)

Some of that feeling of safety also has to do with
Carson's view that racism can only be changed through individual acts.
This tends to validate the beliefs of a goodly number of conservative white Republicans on
race and their belief that blacks like Obama are uppity and far too
outspoken about racism and racial issues in general.

Like
most of the candidates in the Republican field, Carson labors under the illusion that America is a Judeo-Christian nation and not a secular republic. His view of the state of the nation, like the execrable Ted Cruz, is unrelentingly negative and borders on the apocalyptic. Carson also is far better
known for what he is against than what he may be for, and he certainly is
comfortably in step with voters who are oligarch coddling, gay hating, immigrant loathing, gun hugging, Bible
thumping, evolution repudiating and climate change denying.

Where Carson tends to get nutty is when he opens his mouth.

As
someone who rose from hardscrabble roots to become a pediatric
neurosurgeon, and by all accounts a damned good one, and has been an
inspiration to generations of young up and comers, Carson is entitled to
his views. When it comes to health care, that view is free market even
if the system he endorses and got rich off of resulted in tens of
millions of Americans without health care, an unconscionable infant
mortality rate and per capita patient costs far in excess of those in
other industrialized countries. That the Affordable Care Act has begun
to redress those problems simply doesn't wash with Carson, who has
variously called it worse than the 9/11 attacks, the worst thing to
happen to the U.S. since slavery, and akin to something that would have
been endorsed in Nazi Germany.

"The government is supposed to conform to our will," he has said. "By
taking the most important thing you have, your health and your health
care, and turning that over to the government, you fundamentally shift
the power, a huge chunk of it, from the people to the government. This
is not the direction that we want the government to go in this nation."

Carson, citing "a lot of people who go in­to pris­on straight and come out gay," believes that homosexuality is a choice.

He contrasts the U.S. government and ISIS by explaining that the government is "busily
giv­ing away every value and every be­lief for the sake of polit­ic­al
cor­rect­ness" while the terror group is "will­ing to die for what they be­lieve."

Carson
burst onto the scene by having the chutzpah -- although bad manners is
more like it -- to confront Barack Obama, who was sitting a few feet
from him, at the nonpolitical National Prayer Breakfast in February
2013, and more recently has helpfully called the president a psychopath.

When a col­league said Obama "looks clean. Shirt's white. The
tie. He looks el­eg­ant,” Car­son re­spon­ded: "Like most
psy­cho­paths. That's why they're suc­cess­ful. That's the way they
look. They all look great. But he knows he's telling a
lie! He's try­ing to sell what he thinks is not true! He's sit­ting
there say­ing, 'These Amer­ic­ans are so stu­pid I can tell them
any­thing.' "

Oh, and he says Obama could declare martial law and cancel the 2016 election, and he has intimated that if things get much worse, he might emigrate to Australia, which is rich since it has cradle-to-grave national health care.

You
get the feeling that somewhere along the way Carson may have lost his sense
of who he is and perhaps sees himself as some sort of religious figure. This again is not to say that he has forgotten what his
place is, or should be, to use the racist vernacular. But perhaps Carson
has gotten a free ride, or at least an easier one, as a presidential candidate despite saying things
every bit as loathsome and occasionally bizarre as Donald Trump because
he is . . . uh, an African-American.

And while The Donald is
easy to criticize and some of his opponents for the nomination are making a cottage industry of doing just that, Carson can glower from behind that invisible shield
so many of us white folks instinctively erect to seal off strong feelings
when we don't necessarily like the message and the messenger is black.

ES UNA COSA HERMOSA (IT'S A BEAUTIFUL THING)

It is still waaay
too early to fully calculate the damage Donald Trump has done to the
Republican brand, but it is not too early to suggest that he could wreak
havoc in down-ballot campaigns and put the GOP's Senate majority in
jeopardy.

Some of the most competitive Senate races are in
states with substantial Hispanic
populations, including Florida,
Colorado and Nevada, and Republican contenders there have their hands full
placating voters offended by Trump's oft-repeated view that Mexican
immigrants are rapists and drug dealers and his calls for an end to
birthright citizenship.

Democrats would control the Senate with the gain of four seats, or three seats presuming that the next president is a Democrats and the vice president would be a tie breaker.

BLACKMAILING BOEHNER

If I had a dollar for every time I read that John Boehner's House
speakership was in peril, you'd be reading a postcard from Tahiti and
not this column.

Meanwhile, the defunding of Planned Parenthood is shaping up as Boehner's next near-death experience. Conservatives want to defund, but that would require defunding the
federal budget, which is to say force another government shutdown, which
is guaranteed to be another disaster for Boehner and Republicans, and Boehner privately wants no part of.

Implied but not stated in this bit of political blackmail is that if hardliners don't get their way, they'll force a vote to replace Boehner.

The
upshot is likely to be something "symbolic" like Boehner offering a
separate bill to deny Planned Parenthood money, which would please
conservatives -- for about five seconds -- but have no overall effect
except averting a shutdown, but there is a larger moral to this story:Most of the relievedly shrinking field of Republican presidential wannabes are campaigning on Government Is Broken platforms, but it is the party itself through its hatred of Barack Obama and congressional chicanery that has caused most of the breakage and created most of the disillusionment.

BERNIE KEEPS IT CLASSY

NBC News anchor Andrea Mitchell gave it her best shot, but Bernie Sanders wouldn't take the bait:

"I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years. And I know her to be a very hardworking, intelligent person, somebody I worked with in the Senate. So I am sorry, I am not going to get into the media game, Andrea, of attacking, making personal attacks, against Hillary Clinton.

"I just am not going to do that. I don't think that's what the American people want. I think we have got to focus on the real issues. Why is the middle class disappearing and almost all new income and wealth going to the top 1 percent? Why don't we have a trade policy that works for the American worker and not the CEOs of large corporations? Why do we have a system where families cannot afford to send their kids to college?

"A lot of issues to talk about. You'll forgive me but I'm not going to get into attacking Hillary Clinton personally."

And was incredibly gracious -- especially by the gutter standards of politics today -- in an address this week at Liberty University, a hotbed of conservative activism, in making a religious and moral case for fighting poverty and inequality. Or "preaching to the opposite choir," as one pundit nicely put it.

Politix Update
is an irregular compendium written by veteran journalist Shaun Mullen,
for whom the 2016 presidential campaign is his (gasp!) 12th since 1968.
Click here for an index of previous Politix Updates.

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About Me

Shaun Mullen was born to blog. It just took a few years for the medium to catch up to the messenger. Over a long career with newspapers, this award-winning editor and reporter covered the Vietnam War, O.J. Simpson trials, Clinton impeachment circus and coming of Osama bin Laden, among many other big stories. Mullen was a five-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and has covered 12 presidential campaigns. He is the author of "The Bottom of the Fox: A True Story of Love, Devotion & Cold-Blooded Murder" (2010) and "There's A House In The Land: A Tale of the 1970s" (2014). Both books are available for sale online in trade paperback and Kindle editions. Much of Mullen's work is archived and can be accessed online in the Shaun D. Mullen Journalism Papers in Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.